It's time to say goodbye... My final reflections

Good afternoon readers, it is time to say a final goodbye. It was a pleasure to write during this time and I hope that you also enjoyed reading me. The ICT subject is finishing, but everything that I have learned will be always with me. Being honest, when I heard at first that I had to take an ICT subject I felt not very happy, because my general skills with technology are limited. But now, four months after that moment, I do not regret anything.

As I final task our teacher asked us to create a presentation in which we must put our reflections and impressions of the whole course. So, I opened the campus to see all the tasks that I have done and I started summarising all the ones that I liked the most and one that I found interesting but not as much as the rest. I have to say, that even from those that I didn't enjoyed that much, I have learned a lot. It is good to be critical and adapt your learning to what you think that must be useful for your teaching daily life.


So first of all let me speak about the tool I have used for the presentation, present.me. As the title in itself says, it is a tool to present whatever you want. In my case I decided to create a presentation with power point and later on, with the tool, put my own voice to the slideshows.

To use the tool the steps are easy:

• First you have to sign up or create an account, I used my own google + account.
• Then the options to create your presentation are wide, I decided to record my voice but you can also include videos.
• I recorded my voice but I wanted to have pictures at the sime time and one of the options suggested is a ppt so I created mine with the Windows tool, PowerPoint.
• Once that I had my ppt I uploaded it and I recorded the voice. You can also upload a voice file that you have created before.
• The tool is very simple, you speak and at the same time you are passing the slideshows.

Now that you know how to use Present.me, which is a really nice discover is time to show you the presentation I have created. Thanks to it you will see and at the same time listen to all the reflections and the good moments that I keep from the ICT subject.

What do you think after watching it? As you can see I have included possitive aspects but also things that I prefered in another way. I wanted to say thanks to my group and also to the teacher because they have helped me a lot. And when I had to say goodbye I felt real sad because it has come to the end.

So, thanks for everything readers and please, leave a comment if you feel you must say goodbye too. But this is a goodbye to the subject, my ICT journey just has started and it is only the beginning of something. Learning never ends, specially for teachers.

THANKS FOR ALL!!!

Evaluating an e-project

Good afternoon dear peers... The ICT subject is finishing and I feel sad... When I look back to February, a few months ago, I realize that I have learned a lot during this time. I have never been very good at ICT, as I must admit. Nevertheless, I found that I am able of more than I could ever imagine. But this is not over yet and today I would like to bring you a new challenge: creating a rubric to evaluate an e-project.

As teachers we must face assessing student's everyday. We have to learn how to do it correctly and find the appropriate tool to do it is essential. I have never created a rubric by using an online tool, I've done some evaluation forms or handmade tables in a paper, but that was all. The first thing I decided was creating a rubric that could be useful for every type of e-project and including all the aspects that, for me, are essential.

The tool I have chosen, recommended by my peers who have used it, is Quick Rubric. As the name of the webpage says, it is a tool specially designed to save time when creating a rubric. The use is very simple but at the same time complete and the options are not very wide but neat.

• The first thing is writing a title and a short explanation in which you have to include the essential purpose of your rubric. You just have to write it and when you have done it the model of the rubric is generated.

• You can create columns considering the type of mark you are giving them and then assign it a concrete punctuation. I decided to use from 1 to 4 so the final mark if everything is perfect will be 28, which is a 10.

• At the left you will include all the aspects that you will evaluate in the e-project and I decided to consider them according to what it is important to me: the content and topic chosen, the tool selected, the cohesion and coherence of the elements, the creative aspect, the variety of activities, the group work and finally the dissemination of the project.

• And then the rubric in itself has a short explanation of what is evaluated in each row and what is expected from the project to be proficient. To pass the e-project the recommended mark is a 14, the half of 28. Less than a 14 means that our students will have to repeat or revise some aspects of the e-project.

You can see the rubric I have created here:




But the thing that made me finally decide whether the rubric is correct or not was tasting it with one of my peers. For that I have chosen the artifact created by one of my peers' groups, the Body e-project. You can see it here:





After observing and anylised this e-project I have given them the following mark:

• Content and topic: 4. The content is perfect for the topic chosen and it fits with all the objectives established for the e-project.
• Tool used: 3. The tool has been used with a good control. Most of the options of the tool have been explored and used correctly.
• Cohesion and coherence: 4. The elements of the project are perfectly related, coherent with the content and topic chosen and very well explained.
• Innovative aspects: 3. The project includes some elements that were not expected and some innovations. It has a few original aspects that were not demanded.
• Variety of activities: 3. The variety of activities is good and they explore some aspects of the topic chosen. The activities are careful and correctly developed.
• Group work: 4. The project shows a good group work where everybody has supported the others and participated.
• Dissemination: 4. The dissemination of the project is perfect. It is accesible in many different social media and the posts are neat and useful.

Their final mark is a 25, which is a proficient and excellent e-project.

I hope you liked my post, feel free to use my rubric when needed!

Happy World Book Day

Happy World Book Day to everyone!! The 23rd of April many readers around the world celebrate this magic day in which everybody takes into account the importance of books in our culture, history and also in our daily lives. It is a day to celebrate that we have a treasure. It wouldn't be possible for me to explain in only one post everything that books mean to me, but I promiss you that they mean a lot.

 

(Only Harry Potter fans will understand the piture)

I started reading when I was able to, around the five years old. But before that, my mother used to read me books such as The neverending Story and I loved it!! Soon, I started to read books by myself such as: Harry Potter, Kika the Witch, The Lord of the Rings, The chronicles of Narnia and much more. It is not casual that all the books I have mentioned are Fantasy books, since it is my favourite genre!! By reading Fantasy books you can live adventures, meet fantastic and amazing creatures and travel through new worlds and realities.

So even if I have chosen one book my video is dedicated to every Fantasy book that has made my life more beautiful and full of dreams.

First of all let me tell you that the project I have created for the World Book Day has been done with the help of two amazing tools: Piktochart and Aurasma.
  

• Piktochart is a tool by which you can create your own pictures or collages. Before the tasks in the Master's Degree I have never used it, but I found it quite simple and interesting at the same time. When I was a teenager I used photoshop, wich is far more difficult than Piktochart, so I learned how to use it fast. Piktochar allows you to create your own picture by adding images, backgrounds, cliparts and more. Under the explanation of Piktochart and Aurasma you can find my picture, do you like it?

• Aurasma is a fantastic tool that allows you to create an augmented reality project. I have spoken about Aurasma before, so I won't write much more again. Only to tell you that it is a fantastic tool by which you take a picture and overlay a video, so when you put the mobile phone over the picture you can see my video. The result is amazing and I really liked watching my video like this, I felt so proud of myself. Just in case you want to use the tool, I put you here again the post of the tutorial that our group created.

• Moviemaker is a tool I have used before when I created the video for my e-project "Money, money". As I have described then, I love the programme because it is easy to understand and you can add many effects to decorate your video. I recorded myself explaining you some facts about me as a reader and I really enjoyed it.

I know you cannot wait to see my Aurasma project but first of all you have to follow me if you want to see my aurasma, the name of my channel is Mara Domínguez:

And after that there is another step you must undertake, download the Aurasma app for your phone and then open the programme. Once you have opened it, you just have to click on the button to pin up the trigger and then you will see the video. My trigger is this one. Click on the picture to see my pin on the wall:

Besides, our teacher created a Book Day Wall in Pinterest so all of us can post our picture and the project. There all the students posted their pictures and you can see all the videos. I have written about Pinterest before, when I started using it. My perspective now is much more better since thanks to Pinterest I have found many resources, ideas and more to use in my classroom. I have never imagined how useful Pinterest resulted to be.

This project has resulted very funny and also a good tribute for all of us who love reading and books. In my video I want to reflect only a small part of how important is reading for me, but I hope that you would feel more interested for Song of Ice and Fire or reading in general.



Thanks for reading me and Happy World Book Day to everyone!!

Our Aurasma tutorial

Hello readers! As you may remember I talked to you about Aurasma in another entry, but I guess that some of you don't know what Aurasma is. To be honest, neither did I. The first time I heard about Augmented Reality I felt confuse and at the same time lost, what does Augmented Reality means? How can I use it for my classroom? Is it really suitable for my students?

SOURCE FUCKYEAHREACTIONS.TUMBLR.COM

And then I started using Aurasma, I understood how to create an Augmented Reality project and everything was clearer. The tool is not difficult at all, once you start is simplier than you expect and when you see the result you instantly understand that the possibilities of Aurasma are enormous.

But let me show you our tutorial insted of explaning now how I learned to use Aurasma because I will do it in my next entry about the World Book Day. Instead of that, I'll let you read my reflections of why Aurasma is the definite tool to work with our students and my explanation about the programme we used for the tutorial.

The first thing was to create a picture in which we wanted to have our video reproduced. As I told you in a previous post, Piktochart was the chosen tool to create it. Once we had the picture and also de video challenge, using the tool was a piece of cake. Remember you can see our video here.

Instead of explaining by myself how to use Aurasma, I would like to show you the video tutorial we have created where everything is explained with the beautiful voice of our peer, Neus. Screencast-o-matic was the tool we have used for creating it.

It is a very useful and neat tool for creating videos in which you are moving your mouse and developing the actions at the same time you are speaking. The first step you must do is to download the app of the programme and then you can work with it. The tutorial was created following all the steps that a person who has never used Aurasma need in order to create and use by themselves the tool. As I see it the explanation is clear, the steps are slow enough to allow the person to follow them and the visual support is the definitive aspect that makes everything work.

For us, as teachers, is essential to know how to create tutorials if we want to work with our students by using concrete tools. As I have said before, Aurasma is a tool full of possibilities so learning how to work with it is the first step.

My reflections about Aurasma are:

• Augmented reality is very motivating, interactive and kids love it. Besides, almost every content can be taught through a video.
• It is more suitable for older students or high-school children since most young children haven't got a mobile phone. Even that, they can do it at home with their parent's phones.
• The tool seems difficult at first, but when you create a project once it is very easy to create more. You know how to use it fast.
• Another thing to consider is that using Aurasma requires us to use another tool such as Piktochart so they can create the picture in which they are going to overlay the video.
• Aurasma will allow students to create something special, new and everything by themselves.

I hope you enjoyed our tutorial. Try Aurasma by yourselves, it is very funny!!

The video challenge

Good afternoon dear readers!! Today I would like to talk to you about a very exciting project we have done in our Master's Degree... Do you know what it is? A video challenge!!

By deiby-ybied. www.devianart.com

Do you remember my partners? They are Neus, Marta, Álvaro, Paula and of course myself. Each of us had taken a different rol when creating our video, all of them very important. Paula and I were in charge of creating and designing the main aspects of the Storyboard with the help and corrections of our partners. Then we went to Moncloa, a neighbourhood of Madrid in where we recorded the video, being the main characters of it Marta and Álvaro (Imitating a father and a daugther).

For this challenge the first thing we had to do was to outline a Storyboard, or which means the same, a short description of what we wanted to speak about in our video, the dialogues and everything that will have to appear. Do you want to see what our Storyboard looks like? You have the documment here!

Instead of using a concrete tool for that, we decided to collaborate in group by creating a shared documment with Google docs in which all of us could edit and add everything that we considered for the video. For the structure we followed one of the templates that our teacher, @mjgsm gave us for the task because we found it very useful and clarifying.

Storyboards are basic and the first step that we must undertake when creating a project such as a video. When realising tasks like this with our students it is important that we tell them how to create a Storyboard, give them the necessary aspects and tools to take into account and guide them through the process.

When we have finished the Storyboard it was the moment for recording the video. As I told you it was recorded in Moncloa. It was funny because doing that in a city full of people, with lots of noise, was a real challenge but I think the final result is more than great. Do you want to see it? Here you have it!

Our video is going to be part of a collaborative project in The ESL times, a project in which many students can share knowledge related to English. We are participating as well so you can access the page by clicking on the picture.

I hope you enjoyed our video, see you soon!!

Our Infoedugraphic... Do you know your neighbourhood?

Hi dear readers, I come today to speak to you about something very interesting we have done in our Master's Degree... An Infoedugraphic!! We had to work as a group for the first time in the ICT subject and I must admit that I was super happy with all my partners, I knew I was going to learn a lot from them.

By ReactionGIFs. Published on: September 13th, 2013

And our project was called:

Do you know your neighbourhood?

We have a twitter, you can visit us!

Tweets por el @eProject_Hood.

And the main reason is that we think the knowledge about your neighbourhood is a content realitvely forgotten in our educational system even if it is an important part of Social Science. When children are younger, they learn a lot about the parts of the city and the recycling conscience but when they grow up this contents are not that important.

Now I would like to introduce you the roles of our group, since each of us developed a different activity in the group. This roles were basic when working in group in class and out of it.

The coordinator of the group is @Alvaro_Gope. I loved to work with him, he is very talented with ICT's in general and every time I had a question or I was lost, he helped me at the moment. He has a technological gift!









The speaker is @Nepeuspu. The paper is perfect for ther since she is very friendly, talkative and she loves to speak with everybody. She is the perfect communicator and she was also very helpful when organising everything.









The supervisor is @Marta_Gayarre, a nice person ready to help you at every moment. Her paper was to control and supervise that every member of the group was doing their job, and she explained me some parts of the tasks helping me a lot.

Finally the secretaries were @22paau and me, @maradominguezgo  and our main job was to help the group in everything and write and complete all the tasks that our group is asking us. Paula is also a very friendly person and it was a pleasure to work with her. I would love to do it again!







Then we created the Infographic by using a fantastic tool about which I will speak in another post, Aurasma. The picture was created with another tool, Canva. Both tools were difficult to use at the beginning, specially Aurasma with which I had problems. You will see the tutorial we had created in the post I will write and I hope this will help you to understand how to use the tool.

You must take your phone and put it close to the QR code and you will see our video!

With our project we participate in a very exciting proyect called Proyecto Infoedugrafías, by which we are participating in a national project. They are going to publish our project in their blog so if you would like to see it there. It is so exciting to know our humble project is going to be in such a big project!

Thanks for reading me!!

Organising my Resources

Hello everyone! I came here now to talk to you about Organising tools. As I have told you the last entry, I have participated in a bank of resources by using Pinterest with my mates and creating a board. Nevertheless I have decided to use another tool for organising my webpages different to Pinterest: Symbaloo. 

Why Symbaloo? My teachers taught me how to use the tool when I was in first grade at the University and I instantly liked it. I always taught it is a very visual tool, intuitive and neat And also very colorful so it can be used with our students and learn them how to create a bank of webpages useful for their suties. If you have curiosity and you want to take a look, here you have my CLIL webmix: 

http://edu.symbaloo.com/mix/myclilresources  

You can also find other webmixes by using the search option, so you can create your own one but also benefit from the boards that other people have created and posted.

For all of you that do not know Symbaloo, it is an organising tool by which you can create webmixes. A webmix is a page with many cells in which you can create small images that are a link to a webpage. This images are called tiles and you can create your own tiles by adding a picture or letters or you can search for the tiles (I have done so for the social media tiles). In addition, you can classify the tiles and make groups so all the tiles about the same topic can be grouped and easily identified.

If you liked Symbaloo you can post a comment. Thanks!

A Creative Commons License

Hello Everybody! I hope you liked my last entries, today I would like to talk you about the new Creative Commons button I have included on my blog (You can find it on the bottom part). After doing so I will like to share with you some reflections that made me take the decission of including it.

The license I have chosen for my blog was Creative Commons for many reasons that I would like to explain now.

What does your license allow others to do with your CLIL e-materials?

The first thing that made me chose Creative Commons instead of any other tools is the fact that it is a very well-known license, respected by many people around the world so I could have the security that all my work is well protected. The first thing I had to decide was if I wanted my material to be of public domain or to have it with copyright. I prefer my materials to be public since we are all living in a world where communication is easier than ever and helping others is enriching our society. I would like teachers from around the world to see or use my material if they can find them useful. That’s why I have chosen Creative Commons, it is a way to show my work and at the same time allow other people to use it.

What are good ways to motivate our students to use Creative Commons material and attribute properly?

The first we must do with our students is to explain them what creative property means so they can understand at first what they are protecting. Once we have explained this, it is the time to give them examples so they can identify with people whose creative property was stolen by others without giving them proper credit. We can make an example in class, a simulation, so they can fully understand what it means. The best way of motivating them to use it is to try to make them aware of how important is creative property and that one day they could be the person whose property has been stolen.

I hope you liked my reflections!

My PLE and PLN for CLIL

Hello dear readers. Some of you may know what PLE and PLN mean, but just in case I will briefly explain what are these acronyms. PLE means Personal Learning Environment and it is every tool or source from which you take information about a topic, in my case CLIL. By the other side, PLN means Personal Learning Network and it refers to all the ways by which you share the knowledge you have obtained about the topic.

Picture taken from pixabay.com

As I told you my PLN and PLE have been created for CLIL, so first I will explain you what I found positive about the tool and then my previous experience with the approach.

My PLE and my PLN created with the tool Mindomo. Before starting to create the Mindmap I decided to write all the ideas I had about the topic on a paper so I could think over my CLIL experiences so far. Focusing on the tool before analysing my CLIL environment, I would say it was the first time I used the Mindomo but I found it very easy and intuitive. I sooner learned how to use it and I will choose it in the future for other possible Mindmaps.

https://www.mindomo.com/es/mindmap/b6b2c06930ea43fa9920ea4b17677662

Coming back to CLIL I will explain how I have acquired knowledge about CLIL:

-Where have you gained that knowledge? My first steps in CLIL started when I was studying my degree in the University so the people who taught me about CLIL were my teachers. Nowadays the Master's Degree I'm taking at the Rey Juan Carlos is being a high learning source . I keep my CLIL knowledge up by using many Internet tools such as Google, by which I can read and investigate all the new CLIL aspects and theories. Also using Youtube by which I've just watched a Kay Bentley video last week so I can learn about CLIL at every moment. All the tools I've included helped me to expand my knowledge about the approach.

-My CLIL connections are wide, even though my specific training about the approach is not as wide as I would like, I'm on it. My English level is not at a proficient level but I have the English Certificate in Advanced English by Cambridge so I'm an advanced user of the language. Anyway, all my peers through these years and also my job partners have contributed to expand mi CLIL environment and network a lot, not only my teachers or the instruction, as well as I contributed to expand theirs through many tools such as whatsapp, facebook, twitter...

-About organising information the main tool I use is Dropbox. By this page I use to share and post many information about CLIL lesson plans, activities, information and more with my job partners. Also my blog is going to be another tool for posting information about CLIL through the following months.

I would like to end up by saying that I have never though before about my Personal Learning Environment and Network untill this moment and I realised I had learned from more places than I expected. It is completely positive to see all the elements that helped you and that will contribute to extend your information and training on this method so important to our future.

Thank you for reading me.

My 3,2,1 Introduction with Storyjumper

Hi everyone! The first task I had was to introduce myself by creating a 321 Introduction so everybody could know me better. My presentation was created with a tool called Storyjumper and you can see it here: 

https://www.storyjumper.com/book/index/24442188/56c0a9eb94732

(This is me)

Apart from what I told you there, I'm an English Teacher in a school in Madrid and I'm studying a Master's Degree in Bilingual Education at the moment. These are my first steps to crate an e-portfolio.

Now I would like to give you my opinion about the tool I have used to see if it could be suitable for your future educational projects.

What I liked the most about Storyjumper is the possibiliy of creating your own book with such interesting elements. You can add your own pictures as I did (Even editing some of them with the help of photoshop) or you can create characters and put them in a scene. You can also change the background using a picture of the programme or creating your own background. After that you have dialogue options to write the story and also props, which are small pictures or cliparts to decorate and bring life to your presentation (I loved the props, you can use the ones that the programme offers or create your own props). It is quite easy to learn how to use it and the possibilities go as far as you can imagine. After having created it you can save it and it will be like your own real book. In this case I decided to use my own and pixabay pictures to tell you facts about me but it could be easily used for creating stories for kids. The possibilities for Primary Education are wide and you can use many topics or ideas to work through the tool.

The only thing I would change is that you cannot choose or create a background for the cover (You can only use colours but not special pictures) and also de fact that the variety of speech bubbles you can use is not very wide. Apart from that, I really enjoyed creating my presentation with Storyjumper and I would use it again to create a story with my children (I am currently teaching children from 5 to 7 years old).

I hope you will enjoy my presentation and you will know me better!